Finally, my iPhone will start making me some money! How? Gigwalk. It’s a relatively new app that I learned about from an article in the Los Angeles Times, so it’s been around a bit and earned some high-profile, credibility-establishing attention. That’s important for something promising to make you money. How does it work? You download the app, sign up through Facebook or create your own login, then start looking for gigs. I live in Philadelphia in Center City, and there are hundreds of available gigs. What are the gigs? They can vary, but it seems the vast majority involve visiting a business and taking pictures and answering some questions about the place. The gigs pay from $3 to $90, but most of the ones I clicked on were in the $5 to $7 range. However, as you gain experience and prove to be reliable, more lucrative gigs await. Maybe! Here’s what a user had to say to the Times: More

Sometime last week, @YukoFinnegan923 started following me on Twitter. A few days later, she stopped following me. Y U NO FOLLOW ME YUKO? I just now tried to find the account and it no longer exists. Fortunately, I took a screenshot of @YukoFinnegan923 from “Minneapolis, MN” while that cutie still existed. I already knew it was a spam account. That bit.ly URL still works and goes to mycheapjobs.com. The website offers an assortment of Internet tomfoolery, such as backlinks to gin up you search-engine optimization (SEO) results, sites with 1,000 Google +1’s built-in, Twitter accounts with 500 followers at the ready, etc. I’ve long been fascinated by the ways people are tricked by the Internet. Recently, Newt Gingrich’s hapless presidential campaign was accused of buying twitter followers. Gingrich’s campaign denied it. The former Speaker of the House got his 1.3 million followers legitimately, his campaign said. Some reporters and pundits also scoffed. But then a new a people-search site, PeekYou, claimed it had researched Gingrich’s Twitter account and found only 8 percent of his followers were human. Douglas Main at Popular Mechanics wrote an excellent piece about trying to figure out what number of followers anybody has are spam or phony. I decided to do a little investigating of my Twitter followers. More

Jake Davis, 18, lives in a mobile home – a “hut” declared the Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper – on an island in the northernmost reaches of Scotland. From that unlikely outpost, Jake allegedly served as the spokesman for Lulz Security, or LulzSec, until he was arrested last week. I say allegedly, but his fellow travelers in LulzSec and Anonymous have a made a good show of conceding that it is him and have launched a campaign to “Free Topiary.” As far as I know, Davis hasn’t conceded anything, but he surely didn’t indicate any denials when he made his first court appearance on Monday. He showed up with a copy of the book “Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science.” In court, he “grimaced when [the prosecutor] mispronounced the name LulzSec as ‘Luke Sec.’” When he left the courtroom after being released on bail, he donned sunglasses and posed briefly for photographs. More